Ann Oakley’s website has a comprehensive yet succinct summary of the findings of her 1974 study into housework. Students could use the 11 points provided by Oakley click here in a group activity to discuss and further summarise each point.
The class could then move onto to listen to Laurie Taylor’s BBC radio broadcast (Thinking Allowed) which, in the episode shared here, begins with Ann
Oakley discussing the significance of this research and reflects on what has changed since the study was published.
Discover More Laurie Taylor’s BBC radio broadcast, Thinking Allowed
The show then moves on to consider the role of au pairs within families. Rosie Cox joins Laurie Taylor to discuss her co-authored work that looks at the lives of au pairs in contemporary Britain, along with the families who host them. Cox asserts that au pairing has become indistinguishable from other forms of domestic labour.
Students could then conduct their own research into the experiences of au pairs, using the following news articles as idea generating texts:
BBC News - Au pair recruitment ‘like the Wild West’ says expert.
Discover More Au pair recruitment
The Telegraph - The truth about au pairs:
Discover More The truth about au pairs
Evening Standard - It’s all gone au-paired shape. What is life really like for London’s au pairs?
Discover More What is life really like for London’s au pairs?
Students should be able to draw on examples from a wide range of subcultures, both classic and...
A useful overview of the Functionalist view of youth culture can be found below:
Students could be asked to write a timeline of their lives as they anticipate them to be after...
Kirsty Grocott’s article in the Daily Telegraph:
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) based at Birmingham University produced a ...
Some Sociologists suggest that subcultures may no longer exist in the form that they once did. Fo...
The following Daily Mail article laments the adoption of Jamaican patois styles of language in...
By way of starting off an investigation into youth subcultures, teachers could pose the proble...
David Starkey featured in a Newsnight discussion about the 2011 UK riots. This Guardian articl...
The class could investigate and consider the extent to which they consider the ‘haul girl&r...
We begin here by looking at ‘what is youth?’, and then the idea of youth-subcultures
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